Planos originales Casa Labbé / Original plan of Labbé House.
Seven houses
By Alberto Montealegre (*)
gesture facing the landscape of the mountain range, El Plomo hill and the valley of La Dehesa, in a completely new attitude. The classical view of the building as a perfect formal finitio and self-contained condition facing the landscape is clearly broken in this case. The conception of the residence as a dominating presence over an artificially created environment built for it, or the building as the ordering center of the landscape is no longer valid. The Labbé House has no protagonist value, it wants to be a part of and finds meaning in its insertion into the existing landscape; the layout plan rotates following the contours of the site and opens up expressively to the geographical environment. The presentation of a new material and its application is characteristic of this search for an origin. Adobe walls reinforced with buttresses and grouped into a system of small boxes are chosen for stability against earthquakes. A corner column appears on one eave, a log that appears casually taken from the site. The terrace roof becomes transparent as it transforms into a trellis. These are elements that open up a new sensitivity and very free formal categories distant from the academic prescriptions of the treaties. Perhaps the original force this position had at the time of its appearance does not seem clear in our days. Moreover the conceptual rigor that leads to this innovation is interesting as it is faced with the risk of a new academy, which today mechanically repeats the formal vocabulary of modernism.
Two houses must be highlighted from the earliest period of the work of Duhart. They present a refreshing approach also shared with other contemporary Chilean architects, looking for a new means of expression outside of the architectural styles prevalent at the time. The styles, with all the fascination caused by their aesthetic strength and links to a treasured historical tradition, were felt by the young architects of the time as foreign to the new era and cultural reality they were living. It was necessary to find a genuine architectural expression different from the mask of prestige and tradition the styles - often repeated with great skill and finesse - conferred on the owners. The styles were at the time a garment for a representation, an appropriation of symbolic forms. In that scenario, it was necessary to be original, to find a legitimate source from which to pose a new architecture. It was searched in the landscape, in geography and in the most profound and characteristic of a Chilean tradition. The presence of the Modern Movement, perhaps a bit remote during this period, also inspired this new trend. An early project - at the time the architect was 24 years old – for the house of Mrs. Labbé in Alvarado hill (1941) developed with Hector Valdés Phillips, is representative of this new sensitivity. The work is presented as an eloquent
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